


Given Names

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Best Friends, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, M/M, Male Friendship, Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 05:47:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1733309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today has just been ruddy full of "must write." It's been bad for my other productivity, but it has made for a heckuva day. </p><p>Here are Mycroft and Lestrade, not yet lovers, finding their way to friendship--with both aware that more lurks in wait if they choose that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Given Names

One hour.

Two hours.

Three hours.

“Tea?”

“Yes,” Mycroft said, still hunkered over the surveillance equipment, backtracking up a recording, then letting it run as he made notes in a neat, tiny hand. He was still, to Lestrade’s eye, insanely put-together, but even Lestrade was beginning to see faint signs of strain. His…whatever. Partner? Complementary operant? Whatever. Mycroft’s hair wasn’t quite so decidedly combed into place, and he was down to his waist coat, with his sleeves rolled. He had a pair of half-moon reading glasses that went on, then off, then on again as he studied his own notes, then scowled at the video close-ups of the faces on the screen.

He kept looking things up in a Chinese dictionary—not even a Chinese to English dictionary, just a Chinese dictionary, and muttering things like “Was that ba, ba, ba, ba, or ba?” When Lestrade had asked, he’d narrowed his little Puckish eyes and said, with a faint growl, “Don’t. Do not even go there. Just…don’t.”

Lestrade might have felt useless, if he weren’t more than sufficiently busy tracking the new feeds coming in, and ensuring that the existing bugs were all up and running. He was in charge of incoming, and of first-run recognition of voices and locations…and with an entire renegade tong to be tracked that was quite enough.

Still, he was the one who remembered to stop, stretch, make tea, and visit the WC.

“Here. Milk, two sugars.”

Mycroft frowned without even looking up. “Can’t. Diet. You drink it.”

“You haven’t eaten for ten hours. You get milk, two sugars, or I call you in for failing to look after basics.”

“Wouldn’t.”

“Would.”

Mycroft sniffed, then reached out with the hand that didn’t hold the mechanical pencil with the hard, fine lead. Lestrade smiled and tucked the mug into the curl of his fingers, then waited patiently while his partner-beast stopped, frowned, squinted at the screen, and muttered, “Lu or lu, dammit? Do you have to speak like a bloody shiyi ( 尸夷)?”

“You can hear the difference between those?” Lestrade said when Mycroft’s fingers finally closed and he drew the cup to his mouth.

 “Those, yes,” Mycroft said after his first sip. “Most of the time, though, I need to hear the whole compound to figure out which _shi_ I’m dealing with. Tones aren’t everything. Chinese is damned well full of…. _shi_.”

Lestrade passed tea through his nose, and had to scramble for an old paper napkin from their breakfast muffins hours and hours before. When he’d recovered he looked reproachfully at Mycroft. “Biligual jokes are out of bounds. I thought we established that.”

“That was merely a monolingual pun,” Mycroft sniffed. “The sound was all that mattered in the Chinese, not the meaning.”

“And you can make puns that work in both languages—at least somehow? Funny no matter who’s hearing it?”

“Well….” Mycroft shrugged. “I’m told my sense of humor in Chinese is passable but not as sensitive to nuance as I would like. But in all honesty, the fact that I can make jokes at all and laugh at theirs in the right places usually gets me through.”

Lestrade’s mouth quirked. “What really pisses me off is that that’s really modesty. You’re honestly admitting you don’t do well enough—by your standards.”

“We have much better linguists.”

“Better code crackers?”

“Well. A few.”

“In Mandarin?”

“Two I can think of.”

“Cantonese?”

“Um…”

“And that dialect you’ve been on about all day?”

“Chongquing?”

“Riiiiiight. Got many coding spymasters who can at least get by in that with only a dictionary and a lot of cussing to see them through?”

Mycroft shrugged—and sparkled, mischievously. “Not yet. But there’s a wonderful émigré in Eton right now I’m bringing along. She should be ready by the time she’s in Cambridge next autumn.”

“Prat.”

Mycroft held back a snigger—but to Lestrade’s delight, he didn’t hide the fact that he was holding back a snigger. The bright little eyes creased and crow’s feet gathered and Mycroft’s lips turned up and tightened as he held the laughter in, and one little give-away tell-tale dimple formed right at the left-hand corner of his mouth.

“It’s as well Sherlock doesn’t sit in with us often,” he said, happily. “He’d be quite appalled at your failure to keep me properly humbled.”

Lestrade restricted himself to a look that commented on Sherlock’s own shortcomings in that field…and at last Mycroft chuckled.

“You spoiled him,” Lestrade grumbled—but with a smile of his own.

“Dost I detect a trace of hypocrisy, my good DI Lestrade?”

“Moi?”

Their eyes met, and then laughed again, this time as Mycroft was quite aware that “moi” was one of only ten words Lestrade knew in French.

“Tu. Um.. Vous.” Mycroft turned away, then, and reviewed the pile of DVDs waiting for further study. “It never ends,” he said, wearily.

“Which means that no matter what, you’re going to have to pick an imperfect time to take a break. Up and att’em, My Valiant Captain. Go on—bathroom break, then we have Andy-pants order us some dinner, and somewhere in there you tell her when you’re going off shift.”

“I…” Mycroft was about to protest, when his low sense of humor overtook his high sense of duty. “Do you really call her Andy-pants?”

“Yep.” Lestrade sparkled. “She pulled to many 'Andrea-Anthea-Athena-Anthera-Panthera' and so on names on me. So now she’s stuck with a nickname.”

“You do know her shooting averages on the practice range, don’t you? And her jujitsu rank?”

“Yep. She won’t hurt me, I’m too pretty.”

“Um—try again. I once saw her target George Clooney.”

Lestrade whistled, then admitted, chuckling. “All right. I call her Andy-pants and she retaliates.”

“With?”

“The Gregster.”

Lestrade had never seen Mycroft simply howl…howl till Lestrade was quite sure he was crossing his legs in a desperate attempt not to pee himself. Lestrade tumbled into laughter with him, eventually coming up for air still grinning. Mycroft looked at him, pink and a bit out of breath, and said, “You’re not joking? Really?”

“Really.”

Mycroft frowned and shook his head. “I can’t believe either of you is alive.” He thought. “Do you have a nickname for Sherlock?”

“Not one I call him to his face.” He grinned. “John, though, is quite aware I think of Sherlock as the Pretty Pretty Princess when he’s particularly difficult.”

“Oh, lovely,” Mycroft said, on a happy sigh. “I am afraid it’s been years since I got away with calling him any of his family names.”

Lestrade sat up. “He has family nicknames?”

“Well—he was Billy when he was little. Then he shifted over to Sherlock trying to match me and…and someone else by having a distinctive name. After that…” Wicked glee sparked. “After that I did occasionally call him Sh’lock. And Shocking. And the Shockolate Bar. And when I was very nice, I called him Shock or Lock. Those were for when we got along, though.”

“So not much wear on those two?”

“Barely any. Were it not for eidetic memory he might not recall those at all.”

“You two,” Lestrade said. “So—what were your nicknames?”

“Hadn’t any,” Mycroft said, primly, and his chin went up and his eyes went down and his lashes hid his glance and his long pointy nose was in the air.

“Liar-liar, pants on fire.”

Mycroft’s mouth squinched, and his nose wrinkled like an annoyed anteater’s. “None I’ll answer to.”

“Mmmm?”

“What about you, DI Lestrade?”

“Beside the Gregster?”

“Beside, yes.”

“Hmmm. Weeeeellllll.” He dared a wicked, leering look. “Including the ones for private use?”

“You’re terrible. No. Just the ordinary ones.”

“Well, you know ‘Greg.’”

“I know,” Mycroft said with dark and brooding reproach in his voice. “I tried using Gregory once—just once—and never again.”

“I’m not a Gregory.”

Mycroft muttered something under his breath, but fixed his attention on his hands, sorting out the stacks of DVDs. “Again, I learned my lesson. What else?”

“Um…well. My footie team calls me Strat, and Shyster—that one’s a long route, going through Lestrade to Lester to Leicester to a bit of old rhyming slang. Donovan when she likes me calls the gov, and when she’s mad at me she calls me G-man because she knows it annoys me, even if she doesn’t know why. And of course, Sherlock’s nicknames for me: idiot, moron, cretin, imbecile, dolt, prat, clot…the list is endless. The ex called me a number of things in the good years, but most of them aren’t really for polite company. She did call me Grey and Greylock when I began to turn.”

“You weren’t angry?”

“Kind of liked it, actually. She thought it looked good.”

“It does.”

Both were silent for a moment, Mycroft stubbornly watching his own hands sort DVDs into piles, Lestrade watching Mycroft not watching him.

After a few minutes Lestrade asked again. “So…none of your own? At all?”

Mycroft sighed. “A few old family nicknames, like Sherlock being ‘Billy.’ Given how hard I have to fight to get any of my family to remember I don’t choose to live my life under a diminutive, I’m not given to leaking the information to anyone else. A few Sherlock gifted me with—rather like I called him Shocolate Bar. I was regularly called the Mycrobe, until I hit my late teens when I put on weight and Sherlock announced to everyone who would listen that I was too large to be called a microbe anymore.”

Lestrade half-laughed and half-growled. “He really is a _talented_ dickhead, when he wants to be, isn’t he?”

“That I can assure you is true. Too many of his preferred nicknames stuck, too.”

“Poor you.”

“Nietzsche would be proud of me. It made me stronger.”

They were quiet for a time, then. Mycroft finally did call Anthea and ask for dinners brought in. Lestrade reviewed the incoming recordings again, and when through all the connections to be sure they were still in effect. Then they ate and took care of minor business. Then they got back to work.

After about half an hour, Mycroft said, “Why do you like them? Nicknames, I mean. Some of yours are friendly, I can see. But some are…at best intended to tease. Why?”

Lestrade thought about it, watching the gauges that measured input, and audio frequency, and told him how much recording medium was left. After a while, he said, “Because sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that there are people who care. Even if all they care is to tease you. And the good ones—because sometimes it’s nice to have people who remind you that, with them, you don’t always have to be whatever your adult name is. Sometimes it’s damned good not to be DI Gregory Paul Lestrade. And sometimes it’s because I like a name, or who it lets me be, or what it says about how people feel about me. I… _liked_ ‘Grey.’”

Mycroft thought about it.

The little surveillance studio fell silent.

Then Mycroft said, softly, “Mike.”

Lestrade stopped, unspeaking. He looked over at his whatever-he-was. The man was bent over his notes, the half-moon spectacles perched near the tip, frowning and…no. Not making more notes, just drawing tiny, tight spiral doodles on an index card. Around and around and around.

“Mike, eh?” Lestrade was startled to realize his own voice was as soft as Mycro…Mike’s had been. “’S a nice name, ‘Mike.’ Solid. A guy called ‘Mike,’ you think he’s probably a good bloke.”

“Common,” Mycroft murmured. “That’s what Mummy always says. ‘Don’t complain, Mikey. It’s a good, common name. Ordinary.”

Lestrade thought about it, then said, “Archangel name.”

“That’s Michael. I’m Mycroft, I’m afraid.”

“Which means…?”

‘My home. That’s all. ‘My home.’ My croft. My cottage. Mike is just short for that…Mummy always liked Mike, because it was normal.”

“My home?”

“Yes.”

“And Mike’s short for—what? You’re ours and we love you?”

Mycroft gave a quiet snort. “I suppose. On a good day. When it’s not short for ‘Mycroft Jeremiah David Holmes, if you don’t let your brother use your bicycle you‘re both grounded.’”

“Can’t always be bad to have people have a nickname for you that means you’re theirs, and they love you.”

“I suppose.”

Lestrade smiled. “Look at it this way—now I have a choice. I can call you ‘Mycroft’ or “Mike,’ and either way—it’s all good.”

The silence was vast.

Mycroft eventually said, “I saw what you did, there. How Sherlock can fail to see you’re clever is beyond me.”

“Maybe I’m less motivated to demonstrate to the Pretty Pretty Princess.”

“Mmmm.” Mycroft fell silent again. Then, “I suppose I could insist on you calling me Mr. Holmes again.”

“Do you want me to?” When Mycroft didn’t answer, he said, “So…which one would you prefer?”

Mycroft looked up, blue eyes huge, and said, quietly, “Mycrobe.”

Lestrade snorted. “Serious?”

Mycroft grinned. “Yes. It gives us both time to think about the other two. And…sometimes it’s nice to know there’s someone who can tease you without hurting.”

Their eyes met, and held, and Lestrade nodded. “Works for me…Your Mycrobial Majesty.”

Mycroft’s mouth crooked and he wrinkled his nose. “Think nothing of it, Grey. Here—it’s my turn to make tea. Milk, two sugars?”

“Not after a big dinner.” Lestrade smiled as he watched the gauges and graphs swing and flash. “Gotta watch my diet.”


End file.
